


Deliver Me

by superfluouskeys



Series: Soulmate AUs A-Z [4]
Category: Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/F, Names, POV Second Person, Soulmates, mentions pregnancy and miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 15:21:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10811691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: The sound of your name upon the lips of the one you love is like no other feeling.  Senseless epithets stand between you and that indescribable bliss.





	Deliver Me

  * **the one where you don’t know your soulmate until you hear them say your name.**



The sound of your name upon the lips of the one you love is like no other feeling.

Until the moment you hear it, your name has been a commonplace thing.  A mere identifier, used by parents or guardians or people who might as well be strangers to indicate that they mean _you_ , and not some other person standing nearby.  You had never had strong feelings about your name one way or another before--maybe even disliked it, just the tiniest bit.  An old thing you were stuck with since before you can remember.  A burden of hope for your family and your country.

And it's silly, isn't it?  The way we dance around saying the names of others sometimes.  You don't have much of a talent for names--are much better at faces--but you are a diplomat, and so you must pretend to recognize a neverending multitude of dreadfully dull people with similarly uninspired names.  You evade, focus on memories of their countries or their families or their hobbies, and hope that you needn't introduce them to someone new.

Sometimes, too, people dance around your name.  They call you princess, or your Highness, or Sleeping Beauty, or your new, old name, which doesn't feel like it should belong to you, since you only found out about it what seems like this morning, but has already been a few weeks, maybe a few months, maybe a few years ago.

And she says it with such contempt, such aching disdain that it raises gooseflesh all over your skin despite the warm weather.  They assure you that she--the monster, the beast, the prisoner--isn't a threat to you anymore, to anyone anymore, but still you find you cannot shake the thought of her, as though her wicked influence still lingers in the darkened corners of your mind.

Somehow you knew she would escape.  You find it frustrating that no one else seemed to entertain the possibility.  Frustrating, yet strangely satisfying, to watch someone fail after bragging.  Discomfiting, yet impossibly right to feel happy for her escape--the monster, the beast, the prisoner--but it has occurred to you that your fate might not be so different, were you born into different circumstances.

It is on a whim that you start to write her letters.  You see a small murder of ravens lurking about where the spoils of recent battle linger, and you remember the pretty bird she kept on her shoulder, the one your auntie turned to stone. You feel a bit badly for the monster who lost her beloved pet.

Instead of shying away from the wreckage, you decide you must embrace it, or learn to.  You sit in the charred remains of the grass and talk to the ravens, as you would any kinder-looking animal.  They take to you, as do kinder-looking animals, and they copy your songs.

One day, you ask them if they might know where to find the dark fairy who escaped, and they crow happily.  You'd never thought of ravens as creatures who could be happy for any reason other than the misfortunes of others, and you realize that was a rather uncharitable thought.  You pen a short note, a bit of chicken-scratch nonsense, for you're not very good at writing yet, and you can't ask anyone for help.  You offer it to one of the ravens and dare at last to allow her name to cross your lips.

"Would you take this, please, and deliver it to Maleficent?"

The name is cool and refreshing upon your lips.  You'd never imagined it would feel that way.  In the back of your throat, it felt dry and hot and painful, like a secret that could never be spoken.  Outside of you, in the air, atop the grass, and over the wings of ravens, it feels new and beautiful and important.

Nigh a fortnight later, you receive a most surprising thing: a reply.  Her penmanship is artful, her eloquence breathtaking even in such a short assemblage of sentences.  Along with the letter, she sends a strange, colourful flower from the land she's disappeared to.

When you write back, you tell her you'd love to see it sometime.

The notes you exchange start out as little nothings, scraps of senseless language and the occasional trinket.  You have far less interesting things to send than she does, and your days are much the same from one to the next.  She has no reason to trust that your intentions are pure, and writes so cryptically of her travels that you doubt you could track her even if you had any knowledge of the world beyond your kingdom.  You're certain that one day she will grow bored or suspicious, and the letters will end, but they never do.

As it turns out, like your mother before you, you're not very well suited to the role of royal heir provider.  When you lose your first child in an aching, bloody blur of days, your mother confesses that before you were born, she miscarried three times, and then at last gave birth to a little boy who died within the hour.  You ask her to tell you the names she had chosen for your would-be siblings, and the two of you weep together long into the night.  It's the first time you've ever felt particularly close to her.  Tragedy has a way of bringing people together.

You have no talent for dissemblance.  You'd have liked to write about the changing of the seasons or send the ribbon from one of your favourite gowns you've outgrown, but even these simple things ring hollow in the wake of what you'd really like to say.  So you scrap the note you'd meant to send and start on a new one.

You tell the dark fairy of your pregnancy, of how happy it made your family and how miserable it made you.  You tell her how your feet swelled up and you couldn't keep anything down, how you were bedridden for months but secretly got up and walked around at night anyway.  You tell her you're afraid you caused the miscarriage, and you know everyone blames you for it whether you did or not.  You tell her how you can see the disappointment and the blame in the eyes of the people who are supposed to love you, and it breaks your heart.  You wonder if they could really have loved an amorphous, unborn thing more than they love you.  You find that the answer _yes_ is not so far out of the question as you would like.

You tell her what your mother told you and you wish, idly, that there were something other than this left for you in this world.  You tell her that you wish you could be an all-powerful dark fairy and escape this prison and see the world.  Then, when you're teary-eyed and sore all over and hunched over your rambling, ineloquent nonsense, you apologize.  For what exactly, you cannot quite say.  You are sorry for troubling her at all with your silly letters, sorry for your senseless candour on matters that are not her concern, sorry for wishing for what cannot be, or perhaps just simply sorry.  Sorry for yourself.

That night, you tuck the last flower the dark fairy sent you into your hair.  You don't wash your face or change your clothes, and simply curl up on top of your bedclothes, fully intending to cry until you fall asleep.  Somewhere deep within your cloud of melancholy you hear the faint beating of bird's wings, perhaps, and awaken in hopes of receiving a letter, though it's surely too soon for that.

You sense her presence before you catch sight of her among the shadows of your room.  You jolt upright with wide, burning eyes and a name burning at the back of your throat.  "Maleficent?" you breathe into the darkness.

You see her eyes first, glowing, otherworldly, alight with a thousand unreadable things.  "Aurora," she murmurs in response.  "I...thought I might show you the land where I found the flowers in your hair."  Her voice dances across your skin, and it's low and rich and beautiful, but it's not quite right, and somehow the wrongness of it fills the room.

"It's...my aunties called me Briar Rose," you tell her, breathless, almost choking.  "That's always felt more like my name than..."

She approaches, and the moonlight illuminates the rest of her face, pale green and sharp and terrifying and flawless.  "Briar Rose," she amends with the slightest bow of her head, and all the wrongness has left the room.

The sound of your name upon the lips of the one you love is indescribable.  You wonder if Maleficent can feel it too, and so you say her name again, and she repeats yours back to you, over and over, growing steadily closer until she has knelt at your bedside and you are eye to eye at long last.


End file.
